I went home to visit my family in Central Pennsylvania this week. Since I’ve been taking photos of improvised basketball hoops around my neighborhood in Chicago, I thought I’d share some photos of hoops around the neighborhood where I grew up. When I first started noticing improvised hoops in Chicago, I was surprised at the number of hoops that I came across. I shouldn’t have been. Visiting my childhood neighborhood, there are just as many hoops, they’re just all store-bought. It’s not that store-bought hoops are nonexistent in Chicago, but for the most part the ones I’ve noticed are usually locked up in a back yard.

When I was growing up, most people had their hoops adjacent to their driveway in a way that was visible, but clearly private.

My childhood hoop, after my parents gave it to the neighbors.

In a new subdevelopment, built on what were corn fields and cow pastures when I was a kid, I noticed that a number of the basketball hoops were set up facing the street. I thought this was an interesting border of public and private space, semi-formal infrastructure, erected by parents, establishing the street as play space, rather than the street being appropriated by kids.